The batsmen to have hit six sixes in an over

By William Hill

Last Updated: 17th May 2018

Watching sixes sail into the crowd during any cricket match is a favourite for any fan. The excitement levels rise after a ball is launched high and mightily over the rope and into a crowd that are baying for a catch. Hitting sixes in the modern game may have become a lot more frequent with the advent of T20 cricket, but hitting six consecutive sixes in an over is extremely rare. Only a select few have done what was once thought impossible, to join this exclusive club.

1. Sir Garfield Sobers

Rest of the World’s Gary Sobers (l) batting.

The flamboyant West Indian all-rounder was the first player to achieve the feat on August 31st 1968. Sobers was playing as captain for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan when Malcolm Nash came onto bowl. Nash had little idea when running up to the crease that unfortunately, the over would carry the bulk of his legacy. Sobers smashed five clean hits in a row for six, but on the sixth, was caught on the boundary. Nash and Glamorgan’s relief was short-lived, however, as fielder Roger Davis carried the ball over the rope, resulting in the first over to have ever been hit for six sixes.

Fellow countryman Carlos Braithwaite looked on course to become the second West Indian to hit six sixes in a row but ran out of runs to get. Braithwaite smashed Ben Stokes for four consecutive sixes to win the Twenty20 World Cup in 2016. With the target achieved, Braithwaite wasn’t able to keep going but the ease in which he was clearing the boundary suggested he would have done so. Braithwaite and West Indies will be looking to make it back-to-back World Cup titles, albeit in a different format next year in England, but they are the outsiders to win in the 2019 World Cup odds.

2. Ravi Shastri

On January 19, 1985, Ravi Shastri became the second ever cricketer to hit six sixes in an over. The current coach of India is known for calling the action from the commentary box and has developed a reputation as one of the finest in the business, but it was with the willow in hand where he wrote his name into the history books. Playing for Bombay against Baroda Shastri, he hit left-arm spinner Tilak Raj for 36 in six balls. Shastri’s personal connection with the feat of six sixes in an over would not stop there, and 22 years later, on a warm Spring evening in Durban, Shastri would be the man to call the action during another completion of this remarkable feat.

3. Herschelle Gibbs

For Herschelle Gibbs, hitting six sixes in an over seemed to be written in the stars. Gibbs was South Africa’s most exciting and explosive batsman during the mid-1990s through to 2010. It was during the World Cup in 2007 where Gibbs hit Daan van Bunge of the Netherlands for the full complement of six sixes in the over. The ostentatious Gibbs bludgeoned van Bunge’s deliveries with breathtaking skill as the man born in the Western Cape hit them flat and high. Gibbs is still the only man to have completed the feat in a 50-over World Cup game and the first to do it internationally.

4. Yuvraj Singh

India’s Yuvraj Singh hits another boundary.

Few will forget Yuvraj Singh’s assault on a hapless Stuart Broad during a World Cup T20 game in South Africa in Spring 2007. Before Broad bowled the 19th over, Yuvraj Singh had entered into a heated altercation with Andrew Flintoff. It was Stuart Broad who would pay the ultimate price over the next six balls as an annoyed Singh carried out, what is still today, the finest display of hitting sixes in an over. ‘Yuvi’ didn’t break a sweat once and with the most exquisite timing and shot selection dispatched a shell-shocked Broad over the Kingsmead boundary six times in a row. Ravi Shastri was the man behind the mic at the time of Singh’s brilliance, and who better to be calling the action, as Shastri had himself done it 22 years previously.

Singh may have since retired, but his brilliance that night will be remembered for as long as the game is played; what India would do to have someone of Singh’s calibre playing at the Twenty20 World Cup in two years’ time where they will be amongst the favourites to win in cricket betting. Given the spectacular nature of Kohli’s batting, who is to say that another Indian player won’t make history again at the Twenty20 World Cup?

5. Jordan Clark

Six slog sweeps over the mid-wicket region for Jordan Clark was enough for the Lancashire batsman to join an exclusive club. It was another left-arm spinner that went the distance as Yorkshire bowler Gurman Randhawa was given the full treatment by Clark in a game played at the North Marine Road Ground in Scarborough back in 2013.

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